How to Run a Black Friday Marketing Campaign That Drives Serious Sales

November is here, and Black Friday is approaching quickly!

Black Friday signals the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and more importantly, the perfect opportunity for your business to finish off the year with a big boost in sales.

In this article, I’ll break down you how to run a Black Friday marketing campaign for your business from start to finish. I’ll cover brainstorming your campaign, building it, running ads, and turning leads you generate from it into sales.

Step 1: Plan and build your Black Friday Marketing Campaign

Though Black Friday is characterized by intense (and often excessive) retail spending, you’ll find you can find success even if your business is software or service-focused. Running a promotion at this time of the year takes advantage of the fact that your potential customers are actively looking for deals on whatever they can get - they’re in a “buy now” mentality.

Generally, I’d say you can be a bit more direct when putting together your Black Friday marketing campaign - you can worry less about slowly nurturing potential customers, and focus more on making immediate sales.

Though the type of campaign you choose to run will naturally vary based on your business and the products you offer, I’d recommend basing it around a discount of some sort, since that’s generally what people associate with Black Friday.

In this case, I’m creating a bonus entry contest for my hypothetical watch business using Wishpond. I’ll offer two benefits - "sign up to learn about our flash sales as soon as they go live," and then "share this Black Friday promotion on social media to receive an extra 10% on any order!"

Check out the campaign page I made in 15 minutes from one of Wishpond’s templates - not too shabby, eh?:

Here are a few great takeaways from this campaign page that you can apply to your own Black Friday marketing campaign:

An eye-catching hero image: The giant page background shows off one of my business’ products - it grabs visitors’ attention and spurs them to read more.

A bold, value-oriented headline: My headline is large, alerting people of the benefit they’ll receive from converting on my page. Putting a number in the headline (10% OFF) makes my value proposition even more clear and concrete.

Bonus actions: Wishpond’s bonus entry actions make it simple for me to incentivize social engagement. In this case, I’m going to offer 10% off any Black Friday purchase for anyone who earns 10 points by following on Instagram, sharing the campaign on Twitter, or referring a friend to enter. Making each action worth 5 points means if someone wants to get their 10% coupon, they need to complete at least two of these actions.

A contrasting CTA: You’ll notice the only big spot of color on my Black Friday campaign page is the form submission button, and that’s no accident. Having a CTA button that’s large and in contrast focuses visitors’ attentions towards it, increasing the chance they’ll convert.

An exit popup: Consider adding an exit popup that prompts people who might be leaving the page to convert, reiterating the value proposition and directing them back to the page where they can enter.

Step 2: Drive Traffic

Now that you’ve set up your Black Friday campaign, it’s time to start getting people on board. And - like almost every other digital marketing activity you can partake in - you’re not going to get results sitting around and waiting for things to happen. The most important thing we can do to make our campaign succeed is drive high-quality traffic to it.

Let’s look at two effective ways we can do this:

A: Using Social and Email

The first audience you should look to promote your offer to is your existing fans and followers. These are people who have either purchased from you before, or have had enough of an interest in your business or products to follow you on social media or subscribe to your email list.

Promote your Black Friday offer by creating a post for each of your active social media accounts.

On Instagram, post a photo or video to your profile with a CTA to visit your campaign page and link to the page in your bio so people can easily access it. Periodically update your Instagram Story informing followers that you have a Black Friday promotion running. If you have an Instagram for Business account (which you should), you can set it up so people can swipe up to access your promotion.

On Twitter, share your campaign’s link with a call to action that encourages people to visit your page. Set up your campaign share image in Wishpond (or your contest tool of choice) as well, so it stands out on your followers’ timelines.

On Facebook, create a post that encourages people to enter your promotion. If you’d like, you might consider changing your cover photo to highlight your Black Friday campaign as well - it’s the first thing people see when they land on your Facebook page, making it a pretty good spot to promote your campaign.

Last - but definitely not least - use your email marketing tool of choice to send out a newsletter to your email subscribers. Compared to social, email is a way more reliable method to get people engaged and entering your contest, so put some time into making an engaging email.

B: Using Ads

When it comes to driving engaged, high-quality traffic, running Facebook and Google Ads is one of your best bets.

Though I won’t cover Google Ads here (as they’re pretty extensive and we only have so much time), I would try doing some keyword research and maybe running some short-term ads for your Black Friday sales and promotions. For my hypothetical watch company, I'd consider search terms like “black friday watch sale”.

I will, however, quickly show you how to set up Facebook Ads so you can market to potential customers on Facebook and Instagram.

Next, you’ll define your location and demographics. If you’re a local retail store, choose a reasonable radius around your business. If you’re an e-commerce company, don’t be afraid to target multiple locations in the places you ship to.

Demographics are (in my opinion) the most impressive part of Facebook’s extensive Ads platform. They allow you to target people by the characteristics or the things they’re interested in. As you can see, I’ve gone ahead and selected a few demographics I feel are key to my target market, like an interest in Men’s Fashion.

You can also choose placement for your ads. I recommend using automatic placements, but if you feel like getting a little more targeted with your ads you can go ahead and set placements yourself.

Next, choose your budget - this is really up to you. The more you spend, the more people you’ll get to your page (naturally). You can choose to have a daily budget, or set a lifetime budget that you’ll spend over your ad’s entire lifespan. You can also dig into the settings if you’d like to change ad delivery optimization or bid amount.

Finally, you’ll need to design an ad image. If you have a designer, they’ll know what to do. If not, consider a tool like Google Drawings or Canva to create a simple ad image.

Step 3: Use Emails to Make the Sale

Once we’ve set up our campaign page and our ads, we can set up some email automation to make sure we convert as many people as we can into sales.

One of the greatest parts about running a promotion that’s as sales-centric as a Black Friday promotion is, is knowing that people who convert on your page are interested in buying your products. This means that you have a higher chance of turning them into sales than you will other promotion types.

For my campaign, I’ll set up a few different emails.

First, I’ll send a post-entry email after they’ve converted on my page. I’ll create two emails. The first will be for people who earned 10 points by completing our bonus actions, giving them their 10% coupon code. The other will be for people who have entered but haven’t yet received their 10% coupon, reminding them to revisit the page and complete the bonus actions.

Here’s an example of the second one:

As you can see, this email has a clear CTA that pushes people towards an action - in this case, returning to the page to complete bonus actions.

And here’s how I’ve set one of these emails up using Wishpond’s marketing automation.

Next, I’ll send a follow-up email as Black Friday approaches, reminding people of the offer and prepping them for the buying phase. You can use this time to preview some of your discounts, giving people time to prepare themselves for your Black Friday sales.

Of course, I’ll also send an email as the promotion starts to get people in action to buy.

Step 4: Follow Up With New Leads

After we've sent the discount codes, we can continue to push these people to buy. One common tactic I’ve seen is to “extend” your promotion - an extra 24 hours on your Black Friday sale to catch people who didn’t convert on Black Friday, and to add an extra layer of urgency.

Once all is said and done, it’s time to accept that there’s only so much you can do with a single promotion - not every one of your leads will convert, and that’s okay. Remember that we’ve captured these people’s lead information, meaning we can drip them with emails in the future.

And that’s exactly what we’ll do.

Put together a short drip of emails to send to people once your campaign is over. Include emails of a few different types. For example, information about your products or educational emails related to your business or industry.

These types of emails are less sales-focused, but instead serve to keep your brand and products at the top of consumers’ minds and slowly nurture them towards buying.

Here’s what my email drip might look like:

Once this drip is over, you can continue to send them periodic offers in the future. Try to do this at least once or twice a month to keep them warm (but don’t spam them).